It's not so much Buddhism, but there's a distinction between metropolitan Buddhism and mountain Buddhism. You can say cosmopolitan, for instance. You can exist in some of the countries of politics, or policy, or whatever the use of that is. You can be a citizen of a city, or public responsibility of governing a group, or something like that.

[01:05]

Some countries, primarily, the citizen has nothing to do with that. But it doesn't have much to do with religion. So most of, my impression, and I don't know exactly, I can't study everything in every language, but my impression is most of the church leaders had both a metropolitan side and a mountain side. And generally the school, even if it's in a city, emphasizes maybe the mountain side. Because all temples are called mountains. The name of the temple, if you get stuck, it will be a mountain. You talk about how a mountain should be, you know. 300 pages of mountains. Doesn't make any difference whether it's a mountain or not.

[02:05]

Such teachers sometimes live in the mountains with some men, their youth, or disciples. And they either went to the city sometimes, or they sent disciples to the city, or they originally practiced in the city. Or they live and practice in the city, and their teacher lives in the mountains, or they send disciples to the mountains. I'm not kidding so much about whether you're located geographically in the mountains or the city, but whether your practice is one of service or camp or construction. That's a part of it, isn't it?

[03:19]

In the countryside or in the city. It's characterized by a practice of selflessness or service or doing what anyone wants. I think that Paul Meeker's, all Buddhist practices, particularly Paul Meeker's supposed to be practiced from the point of view of the three-fold purity, which is no idea of act, no idea of doer, and no idea of coming to So if you're giving somebody something, you have no idea of the gift, you have no idea of the receiver, and you have no idea of your giving it to them, it's a damage to yourself. And I'll put a picture of him. After the empty circle, he returns to the city. What I'm putting out here is that while we emphasize the fact that one temple is one practice, being both Tathagata and Shantarakshita, still there is some difference.

[04:54]

And practice here and practice there is not a simple continuation of what you're doing in the city. Practicing, maybe in the city most people practice Dalgona as a release from distractions. And to accomplish those distractions better. But here it's just too many distractions and life here is quite To prevent you from, what I talked about last time, lasting into those unconscious, alert, unconscious, but not asleep activities.

[05:56]

That is, you need to do it, like I said, sometimes when I've sent you a hair or a letter writing or something you feel you're You don't need to do it if you're serious, if it attaches to the life you've left outside. In the video I talked about it as maybe a contrast between static space and moving space. As you know, there's no such thing as static space, Most of us think of space or something status that we happen in. But most of us think of it as this. It's all one happening. If you don't happen in it, you think you can rest for a moment in the space.

[07:02]

That kind of regrouping there. Creeping through, kind of. Thought it was to bring back the gaps in our perception between how we perceive it and how maybe it's what we miss and what we wanted it to be better. But we'll never really come up against the sharp edges of those differences until you eliminate your opportunity to regroup and move forward and move over, if you do indeed, and in that kind of sadistic, unconscious state during the day. Anger, we see, is often considered something unconscious or something that pushes us around, that's rather beyond our control.

[08:33]

And if we can control or eliminate anger, we think our life is more career or maybe conscious. But the anger isn't what we should get under control, it's the rest of our life, actually. And anger, if you get angry, it usually means the rest of your life is unconscious. And you don't like to interfere with it. And when you interfere with it, you become quite angry. And you want to go back to that unconscious, stable, undisturbed situation. But calmness is not, you know, protective. of being undisturbed. There's nothing there to disturb. You can absorb any disturbance. Patience, you know.

[09:37]

We think of patience as something difficult. Something a lot of times you'll be patient with someone or something. But presence is more like a... trying to stop a runaway car. The runaway state is not its normal state. So, from the point of view of the palmitic, Patience is a normal thing, and what your patience is, while you're thinking or whatever, just ahead, requires you to become patient.

[10:38]

If the thoughts themselves are the troublesome thing, not the patient. something you're going to even know you have. Other people say, oh, he's kind of patient. It doesn't seem to be the case. It doesn't seem to be the case. So just learn to balance things. Yeah. to next to love. Karmapa is jhana, meditation, concentration, samadhi. Each one of those means something a little different, but different ways of describing it.

[11:47]

It's fundamental. Now, faith, the most fundamental description, experience, or reality of this Buddhism is The real practice here is more not so much service, but yoga.

[13:01]

You can maintain, enter into a concentrated state of mind and not be disturbed by anything. how your attention should be limited to the lives and deaths of your own state of mind, your consciousness. So the fifth jhana brings us to the question of what is your state of mind, what is consciousness? What is your body? What is the thing that circulates within you? I will repeat three times today.

[14:05]

All that feels, falls in. And you should notice the difference between thinking and consciousness. Most people, I think, identify thought with consciousness. Without some thought, you can't do consciousness. But patience will teach you something else. It will show you some small separation which will become a wide door. When you are slow enough to do things, I say, And you should know it. That time when you're unsure. That time when you don't know quite what to do next.

[15:11]

And normally, everything in you makes you move to the next stone. Not like you're jumping, hopefully, to the next stone. But you should stop midway. And keep your dwelling there. You have that assurance that you don't have any objects left to do next. Patience, again, begins to make that kind of space available to you. Until you can see how what to do next comes out of that moment of unsureness that you were trying to avoid. That moment of unsureness, although it makes you uncomfortable, may actually be certain to affect.

[16:16]

So, it's in this realm, this barmaidery. It's emphasized that to practice it, you have to have given up family, and household, and ties, and attachments. Maybe it's non-conditioned or something quite radical or revolutionary. That can stick in a state. So when we do band together as a caste, we have to make up our own rules. And we make up rules which force us into the state of drama. we are distinct and allow our conscious activity to continue unless you use some enabling or protection to get around it and find it.

[17:38]

So, if that's when you do that, I think it's interesting to see what kind of person you are. I don't mean bad person. Usually it's just the one part of it that always came out and And then after class, he said, I can't understand why, but it always is there, this mysterious chemistry. It doesn't mean that you can't have a household. It seems that that sorority must be of more significance in comparison to Janice.

[18:39]

Or, how can you say? What I've said has been the inside of the box. From your point of view, a box looks like this kind of box, round or square or whatever, you know? But from the box itself, each experience is its own shape. It doesn't make much difference what kind of sides it has, what kind of attachments, what kind of hidden decorations, or what form it will be in the future, or what form it was. Although at one time, I mean, although at least The space is defined by the size. It's not limited to the size. So when you know that, you know, that's the size of your life-force. It's relatively unimportant, hierarchically.

[19:48]

And so we say, At this stage, you give up household and family and attachments. Any idea of worldly position or status, such things mean nothing to you. You may be offered some gold status or no status, but still you remain an anonymous monk. It's like For example, Louis is like someone who finds some great treasure at the count of Monte Cristo. And he has no use for it, so he leaves it there. He doesn't need to give any at all. But later, he finds he possesses, without knowing quite why, he possesses certain types of the treasure. And he may use them, or send them, or give them,

[20:52]

But his attitude towards him, even when he subjected him, was the same as his attitude when he didn't care to subject him when he might have been interested in him. So we practice answering again and again deep inside of the box without paying much attention to the sides. And our practice begins helping others to enter in again and again by our own entering again and again. It's a welcoming cure for the sides of the box. And so the second stage of the process is the parameetha, which is giving up.

[22:11]

As the first parameetha suffers, the beginning is giving up what should be accumulated up to this point, when you start practicing. Whatever you have, use it. And then you can, with that kind of attitude, you can practice. and person, and energy. And energy... I'll characterize again. I think I didn't quite get it. More like how to stick to something, while persons are not to stick to anything. So you start to all over again when you come to Ghana, because that's where it's so important and what everything else is based on.

[23:16]

Why the farmers are not so practical and so, so good, but still so practically obligated, but just because they're based on the perfection of wheat in the area. So the first is giving up any identity, time, any being, and cutting off, I said, cutting off your connection to the sides of the bus. The second is the sort of a compensation for something, for a rabbit to practice the four unlimited feelings of tenderness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, even-mindedness.

[24:20]

And those are characterized, the practice is characterized by you have to be quite alert to know what someone appears to be sympathetic to, that's imminent, and how you actually go. The next stage is the realization of that which I ascended on feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. what their existence is, how they're distinguished, and what their nature is. And that's what I was talking before about the complexity of that story.

[25:37]

So the important thing this stage and in this practice period is to know what your consciousness is, what your body is, what your mind is. And you don't have to think about, you shouldn't think about zen center as a whole so much what you're going to do next practice period or whether you'll go to the city or what kind of position or work or job you'll have Anything reality is okay. And anything and things that don't appear in your state of mind, in the width and depth of your consciousness, you don't pay so much attention to. I mean, you don't have to figure out what that person is doing. We don't figure it that way here.

[26:40]

you want some other way of knowing things and of knowing other people. They will appear in your everything that exists for you without you figuring it out by discursive thinking. So in this kind of practice period where we're not emphasizing service so much, Emphasizing jhana, or absorption, or trance. I don't mean trance as in you walk around in trance, you walk into the back door. Some state of concentration. Not always reminding yourself, or bringing yourself back again to what your actual state of mind is. If your state of mind is a little disturbed and you're hoping in the next period of time there's calmness, back off that hope and stay with the disturbed state of mind.

[27:56]

Okay? Sort of tune out a little bit until it goes away, until you feel a little better. Whatever you're doing, working, doing cement work, pouring cement, doing team work, exercising, or service, or meal serving, or eating, what is the width and breadth and depth of your state of mind? What exists there? Don't look for something outside. What kind of calmness and activity is there? Tapahā is pretty well taken care of.

[29:00]

And if you just follow the rules, you don't have to worry so much about anything or think about what to do next. It's a pretty rare opportunity. Everything is taken care of. for each of us, by all of us. And by this tradition we inherited, which so wisely has told us how to take, suggested to us how to take care of life here, so we can practice Dhyana. Do you have something you want to talk about that you could talk about?

[30:02]

I think expecting to be done with the family, to be practiced to, and it is. I keep the sunlight still in my mind, and I keep sunlight all the time. I'm sorry, but it's not funny to me to do all the programs after the sunlight. I don't understand. I can't. I just won't. It won't go out. I can't drop the sunlight sometimes. I think that All this carbon is wonderful, and I feel like if I think about this permanently, I'm wasting what little opportunity there is.

[31:05]

I don't like it. Maybe you need a little longer interim. And really, maybe there's some, there actually needs some break. I think you went from guest season, right? Back to, you know, it's been too quick. So if you'd like, we have a gift, a gift screen guard, if you'd like to go up and get one. Take care of some wild people. I know it. I love you. I love you, too. What did you learn here at school? That kind of statement like that, which doesn't make much sense, or it may make sense verbally, but you can't quite get a feel for it.

[33:25]

like a painted surface in which there are no openings, but you're sure there's a door or window somewhere. When you don't have a feeling for it, that's a very good clue that you should stay with it. Examine that painted surface very carefully until you find some opening. I can't do anything except tell you there's doors and windows and sky and things like that. And I can't feel the paint on it. No. The box, the sides of the box, yeah? Yeah, you can tell. Yeah.

[34:33]

Well, you're brought to this point by your karma, and at this moment you're free, but of course you're still brought to this point by your karma. Your karma doesn't actually... it's accumulated, but it's accumulated because you instantly re-pile it up each month. Accumulation exists because of your active participation with it, or unconsciousness of it. You have to get out of the static space of your home, into that space where you see how you're creating yourself each moment.

[36:46]

It's like getting out of the... I don't know if any of you saw a movie quite a few years ago. I don't know what it was called. Maybe it was called... I'm much younger than you. I think it was called the third man thing or something like that, the third man. And anyway, there was a Ray Moland was in it. And there was a tennis man. And everyone was playing tennis. And Ray Moland was in chasing somebody for one of the tennis players. So everybody was watching the tennis man like this, you know. The whole crowd of people. And he was the one head in the whole crowd. And I was a kid. And I was a good boy.

[37:52]

I was practicing whistling once. And all the kids were taking naps. And the teacher too. Why did the teacher take a nap? I don't know. And I was going, whistle, and out. And everybody just sat up. Teachers sat up and they laughed and laughed. And I realized I couldn't talk. But usually we're on the outside of events, like watching a tennis game. And we don't, maybe our first practice is to stop your head and not get caught by the ball.

[38:58]

But still, we see what happens after the ball's been hit. But actually, you can be there before the ball's hit at the source of your thoughts. And then you begin to have the surprising feeling because you know what someone's going to do next. And a second or so later, they'll do it. Something mysterious that seems out of place. It's not mysterious at all. It's just that actual events occur much more, you know, in a wider range. It's like the spectrum of color or light that's visible to us. rather narrow in comparison to everything we see. The actual range, the actual spectrum. So the actual spectrum of the happenings is quite wide, but we only notice a certain part of it, and it's gone.

[40:02]

So your practice of the paramitas, patience is maybe to stop your head, and energy is to start moving with the ball. I don't know. Don't turn the tape. The person who fell off the fourth post may have been, or should have been, more bothered than he was. But the head carpenter wasn't bothered at all.

[41:10]

He wasn't bothered, because it just was some new situation to work with. And if it had ruined the building, he would have pulled the beam out and put another one in. It just made it look a little different. It's a combination of... It's too much. You get into not just Buddhism or that level of a craft, but cultural things. And the Japanese carpenters are extremely flexible with what is in the process or has already happened, but not flexible at all with what has not yet happened. For example, in the roof, they ran out of copper, and they decided to put copper in, and on their own and paid for it themselves, because the tile roof, which was going to come with the house, would have split, and the tile would have frozen,

[42:19]

The temperature changes, and the sierra would have slowly flaked the tiles. And there's no way to replace tiles so easily as in Japan. So they decided the roof should have copper. But then they ran out of copper, because someone made a mistake in Japan in sketching the proposed size of the roof. Because actually, they modified the houses that went along here. And so they got to a certain point where they'd run out of copper. And in America, they don't make the flexibility and thickness that they wanted. The closest flexibility and thickness they could get was too narrow. So instead of making shingles this size, we suggested, why don't you make shingles that size, up near the ridge? And no one would notice. It just looks like the poor shortening. more for, shortened more.

[43:20]

And they wouldn't do it at all. And they said, it's a law. And I said, a law? A Japanese law? They said, no, a carpenter's law, a Japanese builder's law. If we start the discussion, we make it the same side all the way. Here we are in a remote, It cost fairly the most place in the Sierra, at least as far as Japanese culture is concerned, where you drive. You drive through a wasteland of goldmine diggings and it's in a moonscape, you know, to get there. It feels pretty unlikely a place to be concerned about. But I think if it had been in Siberia, they wouldn't have cared. Some Japanese traveler might have come by. Somebody might have said, this was built by Japanese craftsmen, and they didn't do it. Right. So they were willing to pay for extra width copper and throw the waste away rather than change the size of the chamber.

[44:32]

But that was the inflexibility, shall we say, before. But if all were If you think the cover was already made into the wrong size, they might have just put a vector on it and mentioned a thing. I don't know exactly. It's a little different. A lot of people have known Chomsky and a lot of contemporary thinkers, I guess, Clyde Buddy Stratton. I think that fundamentally our consciousness is the same in the way of perceiving, it's the same in our culture. And it may be true, but my own understanding is that it's so fundamental that it's almost, at the level at which it's the same, that it's almost not a point, that it's different.

[45:39]

and the culture, like the Japanese culture, has such fundamental different ways of organizing space-time and the way they receive information, that I would guess that if you tested the way in which the cones in their eyes sort information, it's already at that level different than the way our eyes sort information that we see in the environment. And certainly the way we put it together, whether it's already happened or not happened, It's a pretty fundamental difference, the sense of reality. So that kind of thing is quite a bit of importance for people who are out studying reason here in this country. But it's interesting, I think, that I didn't... I think I mentioned this dream, I think. But I think people like Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Olson, and other A few other philosophers and a number of other poets have actually done a great deal in creating a language for us to think about non-dualistic.

[46:53]

Think about it. Change our mode of thinking. Copioceptively. I don't think so. How are we supposed to let people know what we're like? You can't help but expect the best. There's no way you can get out of it.

[47:57]

Well, you know, some people, you know, would say that Zazen is doing something like dances. That's just a question. In doing Zazen, you're just sitting still. You're not expressing anything. That's Siddhi, as she used to say, that if you all sit the same, I can tell each of you what each of you is like. But if you're all doing something different, expressing yourself, I can't tell anything. Break time?

[49:19]

You want a coffee break? Nothing to do with it? No? Why do you have it? It would cost you too much if there was no break time at all. People couldn't take it. But also, to figure out what to do with your dead time. Something to do. I don't know if it's a, in here at Paso Haro, it's only been a question as to what it is, what the period has to be like.

[50:35]

But we have adjusted it over the years to quite a lot, to a little, to two little, to as the schedule has changed as we start back up in here. There's other little drapes. I'm sorry, some other kind of drape. So how could you do that something which allows you to continue to do nothing? What constitutes doing something?

[51:48]

I mean, I'm not asking you to answer. What kind of question would you ask? What turns a nothing into a something? What, is some something more doing than other doing? You know? What do you think? Because I really say this is a doing of a something, not a doing of less of a something. You know, that kind of... It's consequences, so... I keep just trying to stop it, you know, I just...

[52:30]

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